'the power of storytelling'
Nominees for this year's Man Booker Prize for Fiction have been announced. The shortlist for this esteemed award includes AS Byatt, JM Coetzee, Hilary Mantel, and Sarah Waters, entries for whom can be found in the seventh edition of The Oxford Companion to English Literature. As well as the A-Z entries, the new edition of the Companion lists the winners of all the major literary awards, and features original articles by well-known writers. Below is an extract from Hermione Lee's article 'Literary Culture and the Novel in the New Millennium' in which she describes her experiences as a judge for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction.
'in spite of the saturation and the silliness, the frequent mistakes in judgement, and the
pain and humiliation they can cause to writers, literary Prizes have a value that is not
exclusively commercial. Nationally, they involve an energetic and engaged circle of library
groups, reading groups, and highly opinionated bloggers. Internationally, they create links
between the writers and readers of different countries. The Man Booker Prize, like the Nobel,
can alter a writer's worldwide profile, either by confirming a towering reputation, or by
promoting a relatively unknown novelist—as we did in 2006, when the 25-year-old Kiran
Desai won for her second novel, The Inheritance of Loss. It can direct, and enlarge, people's
reading, and encourage a vigorous public conversation about literature.
Our judging discussions in 2006 kept returning to well-trodden debates about the novel,
with praise for moral seriousness and social responsibility jostling against an aesthetic pleasure
in high style and a well-played game, pleasure in excess and outrageousness doing battle with a
taste for fine-tuned poise and control. We travelled all over the world, and into other worlds, in
our reading, and listened to an extraordinary array of voices, many of them at the far extreme
of what written language can do. We read e-mail and chat-room novels, futuristic comedy
written in invented dialect, realistic novels in raw street-speech, historical pastiche and poetic
lyrics. We became acutely aware of the fears and preoccupations of the new millennium. There
were many novels about children's vulnerability, women in repressive communities, old age,
and institutions. There were plenty of male mid-life crises. We often came across characters
looking for a secret past, searching for a lost parent, or uncovering a hidden trauma, characters
questing for their true self. There was a great deal of anti-American feeling and many allusions
to war and terrorism. Exile, displacement, and alienation were powerful themes.
At the end of the process, I asked my fellow judges what they had gained from their
experience, and they gave me serious, even moral, answers: that it had been a privilege and a
form of 'replenishment'; that in a time of anathema, novels are a free zone, a space where you
can cross boundaries, and can imagine lives outside of and alien to your own. In spite of the
swirl of biased, gossipy, and superficial commentary that always surrounds the Prize, judging it
felt—most of the time—like a serious enterprise, having to do with things of value: the power
of storytelling, the adventure of language, the future of reading.'
You can read the entire article in the seventh edition of The Oxford Companion to English Literature.
The Oxford Companion to English Literature edited by Dinah Birch, provides unrivalled coverage of all aspects of English literature—from writers, their works, and the historical and cultural context in which they wrote, to critics, literary theory, and allusions. For more information and details on how to order this book, please click here.
21/09/09
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